Reimagining Safe Routes to Schools
By Lucia Blanco
Children observe their environments from a different—usually lower to the ground— perspective than adults do. They are often not constrained by the rules we have learned to follow as we grow up to become older citizens of our city. They are constantly curious and often want to discover things by themselves.
The architecture of cities must respond for children’s needs, understand their perspective and allow them to explore it freely and safely.
Our built environment defines the way we read the city and influences the type of interactions we have with our surroundings and the people who live in them. This is especially true for children and for this reason the architecture of cities must respond to their needs, understand their perspective and at the same time allow them to explore it freely and safely. In an interview for the Play 2021 Conference organized by the University of Birmingham, Tim Gill stated:
“Children will play almost anywhere if the conditions allow. The physical form of villages, towns and cities has a big influence on where they can play, and also on how and where they can get around the places where they live. In many contexts, it is the presence or absence of cars that is the key built environment influence.”
In the built environment, the presence or absence of cars greatly influences the free mobility of children.
In the face of a global pandemic people, and especially children, need safe street spaces that prioritize pedestrians, cyclists, skaters and rollers over cars. Wendy Russell & Alison Stenning wrote in 2020, “children’s movements are not linear but meandering, pausing, dwelling”[1]. This observation evokes a need for more flexible spaces that allow for dynamic interactions and are better suited to the way children naturally inhabit city spaces.
Since May of this year, I have been working with school children, and this article will show findings and reflections from the co-designing sessions implemented as part of the participatory process with students of Stepping Towards a Greener Tomorrow (STGT). This project, developed by Sustainable Calgary, in collaboration with Ever Active Schools, and The City of Calgary and Spectacle Bureau, focuses on temporary interventions that improve the daily travel routes to school for students in three lower average income neighbourhoods with increasing numbers of new residents. The project promotes the use of active transportation modes such as walking or biking as alternative travel modes that reduce air pollution, as personal vehicles are the largest source of air pollution in the city[2] and account for 34% of Calgary’s greenhouse gases.[3] Children and their families are more likely to walk and bike if they have greener and safer routes that connect destinations in their community.
As the City of Calgary works to improve safety in school zones, there are still many safety concerns that affect children’s mobility in their school communities. According to a report by the Traffic Engineering department of the City of Calgary in 2017, all K-6 school zones were changed into playground zones to reduce the speed limit to 30 km/h all year round from 7:30 to 9:00 pm.[4] As a consequence of this, the number of collisions involving pedestrians within playground zones decreased by 33%. Despite this change, speed remains one of the many factors that still concern children and their families on their commute to school. As reported by the collected data of Ever Active Schools, children and their parents find streets adjacent to their schools to be generally unsafe, either because people drive too fast or because they find streets to be very congested. They also found pick-ups and drop-offs at school to be very stressful due to both poor street design and pedestrian intersections that were difficult to cross.
Further initiatives at the city planning level and at different time scales will need to be developed in Calgary in order to guarantee safer environments around areas that are part of the daily routines of families. A prime example of such planning initiatives can be found in Vancouver, where City planners recently developed the Streets and School Pilot. The pilot proposes closing one street adjacent to the school to motor vehicle traffic during drop-off and pick-up times and allow students and their guardians to bike, walk and roll safely on their way to school. The pilot reported that 32% of families walked more, 25% biked more and 29% drove less.[5]
Other street transformations that make school zones safer include design elements such as raised crosswalks or speed tables, use of distinctive paving materials, bollards, street furniture, bike racks, good lighting, narrowing car corridors with chicanes[6], vegetation and bioretention features such as bio-swales or rain gardens. Such interventions help lower the speed on streets in front of the school to 10 km/h, and adjacent streets to 30 km/h.
City planners need to analyze daily travel patterns of families in their communities to identify priority locations for streetscape transformation. They need to work with all members of the family and schools to co-design a built environment that promotes safer, more playful and environmentally-friendly commutes to key destinations such as schools or daycares.
Participatory Process with Students
During the summer of 2021, Sustainable Calgary, in collaboration with Ever Active Schools, worked with Grade 4 and 6 classes in a series of participatory workshops to evaluate and re-imagine their daily routes to school and other target areas around their schools. As the pandemic regulations in the province changed and made it difficult to plan face-to-face meetings, Sustainable Calgary’s team developed an adaptive methodology for co-designing with students. We created toolkits, presentations and playful learning activities in online and in-person formats for children aged 8-12 years. Students were provided with a community portrait booklet with information about their school communities to help them familiarize themselves with the area and its residents before the sessions. Afterwards, they began to appreciate the role of design in the transformation of their urban environment and recognized the importance of active travel in improving air quality in their neighbourhood. Finally, students were placed in teams and were asked to re-design different locations around their school, creating a 3D model to represent their design ideas.
During these sessions, data about students’ main mode of transportation to school and priorities for improvement in their school communities was collected.
Creative proposals were developed by students and respond to specific urban contexts, from high-rise residential neighbourhoods to industrial districts with no access to green areas, to suburbs with single-family homes and low-rise blocks.
Urban Context and Design Possibilities Around Schools
Case Study #1
Community: Beltline
School: Connaught School
The Beltline is one of the densest and most historic neighbourhoods in the city, populated by mixed-use developments and bounded by the Elbow River to the east, active CP Rail tracks to the north, 17 Avenue to the south and 14 Street SW to the west. A community with a high demand for public and open spaces, it suffers from low square footage of per capita park space relative to the rest of Calgary.
“We want to close the street forever and always!”
Connaught School, located between 12 Avenue SW and 10 Street SW, has 410 students and occupies a complete block in the Beltline community. Two blocks away from Barb Scott Park, a favourite among students, as well as the Thompson Family Park and the gardens of Lougheed House. Within the school property, there is a medium-sized play area and a parking lot for exclusive use by the staff.
The students’ design proposals focused on transforming 10 Street SW, where there is a concern with reckless drivers and illegal parking. According to student observations, residents seem to prefer to cross diagonally instead of using crosswalks. Students were also interested in 13 Avenue, which is the busiest street in the area during pick-up and drop-off times.
For 10 Street SW, students envisioned a permanent street closure, open only to pedestrians, to make it safer, stating “We want to close the street forever and always!”. Other ideas included removing the fence of the play area to extend it into 10 Street SW, adding slides, climbing structures and swings, in spaces currently dedicated to cars. Some suggested adding landscape design elements such as a shallow pond with stepping stones, a splash park with garbage cans, and exercise equipment for adults.
The design proposals for 13 Avenue SW, which students found to be “very narrowed with cars parked on both sides of the street”, consisted in transforming the street into a one-way, adding chicanes to slow traffic and multicoloured-painted bike lanes with vegetation to separate them from sidewalks. Students imagined ramps and bumps to make them fun to walk and bike on.
Case Study #2
Community: Meridian
School: Calgary Islamic Omar Bin Al-Khattab Campus
Meridian is an industrial district with more than 60% of its land dedicated to surface parking. Adjacent communities such as Mayland and Franklin are similar, with pavement covering a majority of their land. These three communities also share connections to a six-kilometre abandoned CPR railway track. Vegetation has taken over abandoned pieces of infrastructure like the railway and has an immense potential to serve as an active transportation and wildlife corridor to downtown Calgary. Within the limits of Meridian and Franklin, the Calgary Islamic Omar Bin Al-Khattab (OBK) Campus provides educational services to more than 509 students.
The school, located between 28 Street SE and the railway tracks, is close to the Alex Youth Health Centre, and is surrounded by industrial and commercial areas. The closest rapid transit node, Franklin CTrain station, is 500 meters away. OBK campus uses its parking lot as a pick-up and drop-off zone for school buses and parents. It also contains a small play area which students reimagined as an inclusive play space for different developmental ages. Students identified two streets adjacent to the Franklin CTrain station, the school parking lot and the alley behind the Alex Centre, as priority areas. Their design ideas for the two streets included improving existing pedestrian crossings through the use of colourful street murals and the addition of a raised crosswalk “to make them more visible to pedestrians during the day”.
Students proposed adding chicanes and “School Zone” signage to make the streets feel safer, and suggested painted bike lanes “on either side of the road, one for each direction” to accommodate different options for commuting to school. They also proposed creating a public park close to the station, “mainly for passersby who want to take a break along their commute”, with a play area that featured tunnels, slides, monkey bars and swings.
For the parking lot, students developed a shared-design approach, keeping its function but transforming some of the parking stalls into play parklets that would be “surrounded by a row of trees with basketball nets and hopscotch”, including garbage cans and lighting to increase safety while navigating the parking lot.
Finally, students envisioned the activation of an alley next to their school to create a shared route with a new outdoor corridor where students and the rest of the school community can play, rest and bike on their way to school/home or even during class’s breaks. At the same time, their proposal marks off a driving lane for school buses to use during drop-off in the morning.
They also wanted to add curb and planter boxers to improve unsafe intersections and add more greenery into the area.
Case Study #3
Community: Martindale
School: École La Mosaïque
Martindale, a community in northeast Calgary, is mostly residential and does not present much permeability for through-traffic, with the majority of its roads ending in cul-de-sacs. The CTrain line crosses diagonally through Martindale, whose edges are defined by high traffic roads and the International Airport to the east. Large open green areas are available to the community, however, these are not well-equipped to host sports or play activities, and result in a lack of space for recreation.
École La Mosaïque is a francophone school located in the south of the community, next to the Dashmesh Culture Centre. The school has over 280 students and is located between the only two local stores, one being a 7/11 with a gas station, a favourite outdoor place for students to walk or bike.
Students identified Martindale Blvd NE, where the school bus landing zone is located, and the adjacent intersection crosswalks, as unsafe spaces. Nevertheless, students decided to focus their ideas on redesigning the large field behind their school as it is “a place that the community uses all the time”. Their proposals focused on transforming the field into a play space, “where children and adults can have fun together after basketball games”, sit on rounded furniture, play with yellow climbing structures featuring soft cushion landing pads, and use a climbing gym for more physical challenges.
Next Steps/Conclusion
(STGT) aims to explore new channels of participatory design with children to demonstrate that they are integral actors who must be included in the decision-making processes of our cities.
In the coming months, Sustainable Calgary will implement student design proposals—developed during the co-design sessions mentioned in this article—into tactical urbanism interventions to temporarily improve streets around schools, while providing playful and social experiences for the above-mentioned communities. We hope this project will help prioritize more environmentally and participatory conscious initiatives for the design and transformation of Calgary’s streetscapes especially around school grounds, and to scale up these prototypes into permanent green infrastructure where children can freely and safely navigate the city on their own.
